New Beginnings
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Seated on a George Nelson bench, feline resident Miu Miu gazes through the east picture window at the ongoing construction. Sharing the bench is a quarter-inch-to-one-inch-scale model of the house and addition.Photo by: Adam Friedberg -
On the north façade, a rectangular void cuts through the addition’s second floor. A translucent passage will connect the addition to the existing house.Photo by: Adam Friedberg -
The house’s street-facing west façade. A narrow skylight cuts through the Cor-ten cladding where the roof curves to meet the south wall, bringing cru-cial light into the second floor—and, through an open-ing in the ceiling, also the first floor.Photo by: Adam Friedberg -
The original facade.Photo by: Adam Friedberg -
Typical for traditional New England, the original structure looked quaintly stifling both inside and out.Photo by: Adam Friedberg -
Now light emanates through the house’s rear window, and through polycarbonate panels concealing the upstairs bedroom.Photo by: Adam Friedberg -
Kim reads the newspaper in the all-white kitchen. White paint, which requires fewer coats than color, was a money-saving strategy. The desk chairs and aluminum lounge chair are both Eames, courtesy of Fernandez’s scavenging.Photo by: Adam Friedberg -
Lit by the skylight and an Artemide ceiling lamp, Schenk and Ngai consult laptops on mid-century Heywood Wakefield desks, which Fernandez salvaged from a Harvard junkyard and then restored.Photo by: Adam Friedberg -
Upstairs, simple porcelain pieces such as a Kohler toilet adorn the modest master bathroom. Beneath the downward-pitched ceiling, a polycarbonate-panel wall brings in light from the south-facing skylight behind.Photo by: Adam Friedberg -
An ingenious floor treatment—slats laid over the ceiling beams—enables the skylight to do double duty, pouring sunlight into the living room below. The translucent bathroom wall turns that into triple duty.Photo by: Adam Friedberg -
Uni exposed the ceiling beams, formerly concealed by drywall and a kitschy light fixture upon which Schenk would hit his head. They built a platform bed using a couple of hollow doors as a surface for the mattress.Photo by: Adam Friedberg
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When we first visited Beat Schenk and Chaewon Kim two years ago, they were in the process of building the second house on what has turned into a Cambridge compound.
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